Yahoo! Cool Thing of the Day

In the same "open" vein (ha!) as the My Yahoo! Open Apps mentioned yesterday, we have Yahoo! Mail also starting to push out support for external applications. This is theoretically huge for application developers, given the enormous reach of the Yahoo! mailbox, and there are plenty of benefits for Yahoo! users as well. Among the sample applications available is the very useful Photos application by Xoopit, who also happened to be the overall winners of our last Open Hack Day; hooking up with them gives you a sweet interface for browsing tangible items (especially photos, but you can also see things like videos and random notifications through the actual Xoopit site) scattered throughout your mail. There's also a WordPress plugin, which allows you to pull content directly from your Inbox tabs into a WordPress tab for writing posts. As a demonstration of the utility of such a feature -- guess how I wrote this entry!*

Access to the Mail open applications is being rolled out in limited beta fashion, but you can sign up for the waitlist here.

* on a laptop

Hopefully all of you have had wonderful Christmas or other holiday breaks! *looks for recent blog updates* I apparently did.

The obvious follow-up to the festive season is New Year's Resolutions, and here at Yahoo!, we've been pledging to be more open. My Yahoo! is getting a head start with their introduction of Open Apps, which are basically just like Facebook applications, if you want a very high-level summary. In addition to adding some outside flair to your collection of My Yahoo! modules, Open Apps also can gain access to the nascent social network being formed through our Profile pages and share custom information between you and your connections. External developers have already chipped in such scintillating modules as a calorie counter and an Office trivia game, and the application pool can only get better from here. One would hope, at least, and isn't that what the New Year is all about?

Yahoo! recently made its way into the Top 20 of Most Trusted Companies For Privacy, debuting at #14. It makes sense, because, seriously, it's not like we're going to do anything to piss off our users at times like these. Not being ones to rest on our laurels, though, we took things a step further by drastically revising our data retention policies to make sure we don't hold onto any data that we passively collect from you any longer than we need to. Just a year ago, we committed to anonymizing personal data like search queries, page views, ad clicks, and so on after 13 months; now we've dropped the number down to 90 days (with a couple of abuse related loopholes, where the number goes to 6 months, and then the obvious legal caveats). It's an industry-leading move and it carefully balances our needs regarding behavioral analysis, ad selection, and all that cool stuff with your need to not have that totally innocuous search that you made a year ago come back to haunt you. I mean, not that you'd be doing anything awkward like that anyway, but after 90 days, we'll have forgotten all about it. Trust us!

So many cool things going on right now, so few posts here covering them. :P It's a tough life, being irresponsible.

So, where to start? Perhaps you've heard that Yahoo! Mail has unveiled its new "smarter inbox", which finally makes good on the promise of giving you an actual reason to establish social connections within Yahoo!, for a more substantial purpose than just keeping count of your friends. Because the emails from your friends are the ones that you'll most likely care the most about, our smarter inbox pulls them right to the forefront on your Welcome page (as a side effect, also finally giving a substantial purpose to the Welcome page!), so they're the first thing that you see when you sign in. Once you get into your Inbox, you can also filter for emails from your connections, letting you weed out all the riff-raff if you don't have a lot of time to peruse your mail. You may not set up your Profile and invite all of your friends to Yahoo!'s social stuff just for fun, but maybe you will for the smarter inbox fun...ctionality.

Best of luck to all of the recently displaced Yahoos out there. Hopefully, even in this rough economy, their skills will be in high demand and they can still end up having a happy holiday with another company.

Which, of course, entirely inappropriately segues into a mention of the fact that the Yahoo! Messenger guys released a fun little holiday application to spread some musical cheer this season, featuring a host of text-to-speech powered emoticons. Hilarity.

Delicious has had in-line MP3 playback for a while, which works out really well when you use the "system:media:audio" tag to isolate bookmarked audio files. But things get even better when you throw FoxyPlayer into the mix, because now you can actually queue up all of the audio on the page instead of needing to explicitly start up each one. So, for instance, while you read the more detailed post over at the Yahoo! Music Blog, you can also kick off a new tab of mashup music and have tunes to keep you occupied throughout. It's a much better example than this post, which lasts at best a half of a song.

iPhone users will certainly be happy to see this news -- Flickr has released an upgraded version of their mobile site, and it now supports video playback! In addition, there are all sorts of tweaks to your mobile social activity, with extra information added to the activity stream from your contacts and the ability to add favorites or comment on photos. The corresponding post on Yodel Anecdotal makes a great point you don't need to carry around pictures in your wallet any more, because you can just share your entire library of photos through Flickr's mobile site and a smartphone. And now you can bore them with your home videos, too.

Search Assist does a great job of guessing what you might be trying to search for, thus saving you quite a bit of typing time if you happen to have a particularly long query ("supercalif..."). But that's just autocomplete search: still cool, but everyone's doing it these days. We definitely have room to be more helpful -- to, for instance, gently suggest to you some more specific paths to walk down if you reach a dead end with your search. That goal is achieved in a really slick way with Search Assist for Image Search. Once you've submitted your query and are sitting there staring at a bunch of results that you're not quite sure about, you can still pull down the Search Assist module and see a few thumbnail images for related concepts that might give you a result you prefer.

You get the same sort of behavior with the regular Search Assist for the Web, except it'll give you related concepts to explore instead of thumbnails -- the Image Search version is just especially pretty. It would be slightly snazzier if we were able to pop in the thumbnails after a slight pause in typing instead of needing to actually submit the search query, but it's very cool and helpful nonetheless. And as a side bonus, the visual aspect gives you a bit of encouragement to explore the web instead of just zooming to your destination -- why, yes, I was just looking for an apple but pictures of Christina Applegate are good, too... :D

We're rapidly approaching the end of the year (marked by the proliferation of holidays, including last week's unannounced Thanksgiving hiatus due to vacation), which means that it's just about time to start quantifying all of the key trends of the past year in 10-item lists. So, of course, we ask: what are the best Top 10 lists that Yahoo! is offering this year? Let's take a look!

(if you're not a fan of reading lists, well, here's a link to our main Top 10 list anyway. Maybe you're just not a fan of reading my lists.)

The Top 10 Yahoo! Top 10 Lists of 2008

10. Top 10 Destinations 2008 - The presentatation is somewhat lacking, with minimal color commentary associated with the list of most-searched vacation spots.

9. Top 10 Mobile Searches of 2008 - A somewhat less scrubbed list that features numerous navigational queries, though it's certainly still interesting to know where people navigate using their tiny cellphone screens.

8. Top 10 Restaurants - A clean presentation that softens the grim realization that I'll probably never have a chance to eat at most of these restaurants.

7. 2008's top ten most searched tech terms - Excellent commentary by the ever amusingly named Christopher Null.

6. Top 10 Products of 2008 - All the information you need to get in on the fun of purchasing some of these popular products, and hey, there's a handy price comparison button and everything! It's almost as though we're using these top ten lists as a way to surreptitiously promote our own services.

5. Top 10 Most Popular Casual Games - This list has the nice twist of indicating which games were actually played the most, instead of just the ones that were most often searched for.

4-1. Year in Review 2008 - This is the big kahuna, the head honcho, the [8 more descriptive idiomatic expressions]. It comprises nearly 10 (7, actually) of its own sub-lists, from Olympians to Economy, hence its occupation of the top 4 slots of this list. There's plenty of explanation available for all of the Top 10 choices, along with FAQs about methodology, comparisons to previous years, and even more Top 10 lists through the late-breaking blog, if Yodel Anecdotal is to be believed. It is truly a Top 10 list to rule all Top 10 lists.

Whenever I watch the nightly news, I invariably end up a bit depressed. There's some other war going on. The economic crisis is deepening. We're once again running low on Nintendo Wiis. You really get to thinking that nothing good is happening in the world, unless you're watching the Daily Show in which case you can at least have a good laugh about it.

Obviously, that's no way to feel as we enter the holiday season, so maybe we need some slightly more uplifting viewing material. Enter Good News Now, a Yahoo! News production that brings together clips of all of the awesome stories that actually are getting covered in the news when you're not looking. Today I learned about a grandmother who has cut out tens of thousands of coupons to send to US troops, and a man with cerebral palsy who fulfilled his dream to walk all of the holes on the PGA Tour, and, by gosh, it just makes your day a little bit brighter. As they say, there's no news like good news, and Good News Now will give you a steady supply from now until New Year's.